Where's my Oscar? ... Christopher Nolan accepts the Golden Eddie film-maker of the year gong for Inception – but is not up for the best director Oscar. Photo: Getty Images

It was pretty obvious to anyone at the University College London film society in the early 1990s (which comprised about half a dozen of us in a windowless, airless basement) that Chris Nolan was going places. I thought his career might even go all the way, and he might shoot a few adverts before eventually (if he got lucky) directing episodes of The Bill and Coronation Street.

That was simply how the UK film industry was back then. The only career path was to worm a way into directing for telly or commercials. It had been generations since John Schlesinger, Ridley and Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne and Alan Parker had managed to make the leap from London, and telly, to Hollywood. Chris, however, was different. Not only in appearance (a permanent open-collared shirt and linen suit as an undergraduate, even as the rest of us took pride in our early-90s indie-grunge student status) but in his ambition and focus.

From 1992-94, he was president of UCL film soc and I was secretary. This impressive-sounding title was actually banally literal: it mostly comprised taking minutes of the Wednesday afternoon meeting, usually while seated in the NHS wheelchair (purloined from who knows where) used to steady the camera operator for tracking shots.

The venue was an Aladdin's cave for budding film-makers. At some point in the late 1960s – so the story went – a bequest had enabled UCL to purchase a Steenbeck editing suite (real film, real spools) plus a couple of 16mm cameras. On top of that, there was an enormous amount of bric-a-brac and detritus, collected over the years, including some costumes and mini-railtrack (again, for supposedly steady tracking shots) – all housed in the basement under the Bloomsbury theatre and shared with students from the then-fledgling UCL union TV station, whom we unashamedly looked down on.

For me, the whole place was a wonder – a completely unexpected bonus to my English degree. For Chris, it was his office. He'd selected UCL specifically for its film-making facilities and had been making movies since he was 7 years old, filming his Star Wars figurines (with some primitive early VHS recorder, presumably).

Our most enjoyable task was curating each term's movie programme – to be shown, on 35mm film, in the full-sized Bloomsbury theatre, albeit only as matinees on Wednesdays.

Those years were far from a golden age in any sense – Wayne's World, 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Juliette Binoche's The Horseman on the Roof were on the bill, I remember – but Chris (never one to show much emotion) was overawed with the 1993 release of Ridley Scott's director's cut of Blade Runner. For me, then as now, it did nothing – I was too busy exploring the esoteric delights of French auteur Eric Rohmer and Iran's Abbas Kiarostami over the road at the Renoir cinema in the Brunswick centre. We both had a soft spot, however, for Roman Polanski's spectacular 1992 misfire, Bitter Moon.

Chris combined his debonair and self-assured manner with some peculiar hobby-horses. He was vehemently anti-smoking, castigating me once for have a crafty fag outside the basement while we waited for someone to turn up with a key. "People think it makes them look cool – it doesn't," was his pithy and (at the time) unfashionable view. I haven't seen all his movies, but I can't remember any Nolan heroes smoking in the ones I have. He was also conservative (with a small c) in his private life – his girlfriend back then was Emma Thomas, and they're still together. She is now his wife, producer and business partner.

Meanwhile, Chris was getting on with his movies. Having graduated in 1993, he continued to surreptitiously (not that anyone minded or noticed) hang out at the film society. Actually, "hang out" is the wrong expression – he worked ferociously hard, was super-focused and was teaching himself whatever little he didn't already know about the sheer mechanics and technology of cameras and film-making.

I remember stumbling in one afternoon to find Chris and a couple of others composing a special-effects shot, which seemed to involve shooting through a large Pyrex baking bowl. I don't know now whether that ended up in Larceny or Doodlebug – two of his early shorts.

Meanwhile, I plodded on with my own dire attempt at film-making – a three-minute "funny" entitled The Procrastinator, following 24 hours in the life of a neurotic but disorganised student as he tried to meet an essay deadline. Yes, it was autobiographical. The revelation (to me) that it took a team of four – director, actor, lighting-cameraman and sound – at least 12 hours to shoot a mere 10 minutes of rushes, of which three minutes of scraps were usable, put me off film-making for more than 15 years. I fancied being an auteur, not the head of a chain gang. That said, Chris showed me how to operate a flatbed Steenbeck editing suite – something to tell the grandchildren.

The last time I saw Chris in and around UCL was when I bumped into him at the Warren Street Pizza Express in 1997. Entirely by coincidence, he was there with a small wrap party for what must have been Doodlebug. He was supporting himself by making corporate training videos – Following, Memento and the Hollywood blockbusters were still to come.

We did meet by accident one more time, at the Rotterdam film festival in 2001. I'd just landed a job at the Guardian and was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Chris somewhat trumped that by telling me he was just off to Vancouver to shoot Insomnia with Al Pacino. However, Chris hadn't turned into any sort of Hollywood ego-monster. He was the same: reserved, self-confident but charming – despite the enormous success his talent was on the verge of bringing him.

In fact, Chris has been rather touchingly dedicated in paying tribute to UCL. It's there as a location in Inception – standing in as the Paris architecture school in the lecture and library scenes – while the nearby Senate House building features in Batman Begins. Following, meanwhile, starred university friends Jeremy Theobald and Lucy Russell (who then went on to star in Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke).

I went off into journalism. Funnily enough, the Village Voice's film critic, Dennis Lim, was then my arts editor at the London Student newspaper. And apparently Ricky Gervais was the events manager at the University of London union across the street. Small world – if only we'd known it.